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Suspect arrested after standoff in Riverside

Photos by GRETEL DAUGHERTY/The Daily Sentinel—A SWAT team officer communicates with a woman and a girl inside a house that was within the police perimeter during a standoff with a carjacking suspect in the Riverside neighborhood of Grand Junction. The suspect, shown below with his pants down, was in an abandoned home nearby. He also was suspected of burglary of a home and stealing firearms.

Law enforcement officers and SWAT team members surrounded an abandoned home just off Riverside Parkway on Wednesday and waited late into the evening trying to coax an armed burglary suspect outside.

The man, whose identity was not released, was arrested after a four-hour standoff when police tear-gassed and then stormed the home.

The man, a white male wearing camouflage clothing, was jailed on suspicion of burglarizing a home and stealing an automobile from a Little Park family on Wednesday afternoon, said Deputy Ben Carnes, spokesman for the Mesa County Sheriff’s Department.

The man also had firearms that were believed to have been stolen, the Sheriff’s Department said.

“A family came home to their house in the 200 block of Little Park Road, they found a stranger at their house ... and somehow the stranger stole their car,” Carnes said. “They watched this happen.”

That vehicle was found about an hour later in the Riverside neighborhood near the Broadway interchange with Riverside Parkway, about a block away from where the man was hiding. He was in an abandoned home near the intersection of Lawrence and Lila avenues.

Law enforcement officials quickly descended upon the home after nearby residents alerted them to his presence.

One of those neighbors was 12-year-old Brandon Robinson, who said he saw the man running toward the shed of a friend and later heard the man on his cellphone calling for someone to pick him up.

“He asked me if he could stay there (in the shed) and he was on the phone saying, ‘Come pick me up, the cops are coming,’ ” Brandon said. “Then I got my friend’s mother, and she said, ‘Get in the house.’ Then she called police.”

Not long after that, an armada of squad cars arrived and surrounded the home around 4 p.m.

By 8 p.m., police closed off Riverside Parkway and shot tear gas into the home, forcing the man to flee.